Asking students to conduct research for a real purpose, write for public audiences, and share their findings may motivate them to do their best work in our classes.

Now, Clio makes this work feasible for students and instructors. 

Hundreds of universities have chronicled their communities in Clio, a website and mobile application that connects thousands of people to nearby history and culture each day. Clio is a non-profit organization based in Kansas City that offers a variety of free programs and tools to help university faculty and students chart individual landmarks, build walking tours, and create virtual tours of museums and sites. To date, Clio has more than 39,000 articles and 1,300 trails and walking tours that users can access with their mobile devices.

Instructors in diverse disciplines can adapt Clio to serve the content of their classes. For example, a biology professor could ask students to map local sites for wildlife observation; a civil engineering professor could assign students to chart bridges; and an art historian could require students to catalog public art. For a report about a Boston University professor’s use of Clio, go to https://www.bu.edu/articles/2018/documenting-the-real-story-behind-boston-memory-sites/

To learn how to incorporate Clio into your curriculum, join Dr. David J. Trowbridge, from 1-2 p.m. Friday, March 11, 2022, in Zoom. Dr. Trowbridge is the developer of Clio and an associate research professor of digital and public humanities in the Department of History at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. For a more detailed overview of Clio, go to https://humanitiesforall.org/projects/clio

This event is open to all instructors at UMKC and area institutions and is sponsored by the UMKC Center for Faculty Excellence (CAFE).  For more information, contact Henrietta Rix Wood, the CAFE Faculty Fellow for Teaching Writing, at woodhr@umkc.edu